It may be hard to fathom given the high number of unemployed IT professionals currently available for higher, but companies could be confronted by a talent shortage in the data centre. According to Dr. Mickey Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, at SunGard Availability Services, there are two trends that are converging to make this a very real possibility. The first simply has to do with our aging population and systems. Many of the data centers in operation today are heavily dependent on legacy systems such as mainframes.

KVH has announced that it has completed construction of the first building of Tokyo Data Center, KVH's second data centre in the Tokyo vicinity, and that the facility is now operational. The new data centre is located in Inzai city which is midway between Tokyo city centre and Narita airport in Chiba Prefecture.

The IT arm of technology conglomerate IPVG, has announced that it has signed a P105-million loan agreement with Banco De Oro to finance the construction of a new Internet data centre facility in Bonifacio City in Taguig.

Continental Broadband, parent company of Expedient Communications, DataPoint and n|Frame, providers of data centre colocation, managed services and connectivity solutions in several US markets, have announced their facility expansion and improvement plans for 2011. The company announced a variety of multi-million dollar facility expansion and capacity upgrade projects in all of its markets. Highlights of the multi-market projects include:

Mobile enterprise software application company Digital Development Partners has announced that its team of independent IT developers has developed and tested the systems for the EFT-Telephony network for VoIP functionality.

The company said that as of today the telephony network includes 7 servers located in different data centres co-located worldwide. The company also said it has contracted with a telecom provider for maintenance of these servers and the maintenance of the telephony network, effective January 2011.

The way in which the BBC outsourced and then “reinsourced” its ongoing project to digitise its archive was poorly managed, a review by the National Audit Office. Although the Digital Media Initiative is now delivering results, the NAO found that inadequate supplier management and project governance had severely impact the project’s value for money.

In 2004, the BBC appointed its primary IT services supplier Siemens to undertake the Digital Media Initiative without allowing any other suppliers to bid for the contract, the NAO report found.

Virgin Media Business has announced plans to use its nationwide fibre network to offer carrier-grade connectivity to data centres across the UK. The company will give data centre managers the ability to connect up to 8,000 customers at speeds of up to 10Gbit/s, while reducing space and power requirements to offer a guaranteed level of service.

Communications and networking provider Entanet UK, which sells wholesale voice and data products to ISPs, has completed a significant upgrade to its national network. The work has resulted in a 500% capacity increase at its London-Midland-North ring.

Entanet claims that it already operates at 10Gbps or better across London and at 10Gbps between London and its principal Birmingham, Stoke and Manchester locations. It has now replaced eight 1Gbps wavelengths with four 10Gbps wavelengths between London, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester as part of its on-going strategy.

Tech giant, HP, has announced a A$119 million data centre in Sydney’s Eastern Creek but resellers and partners aren’t going to be a part of plans yet. The data centre will be built in a modular design and have two “shells”. Each “shell” will then have two “cells”, within which is another “shell”. This will result in five cells of 2320 square metres each and the final size will be almost the same as 45 tennis courts.

Despite energy demands increasing as temperatures reach 40 degrees Celcius in Sydney this week, data centres in the area have not yet reported any power failures. According to a Macquarie Telecom spokesperson, there has been no negative effect on its data centres as a result of the recent weather conditions. “Our data centres are equipped with redundant power components to guarantee continuous power availability and uptime," he said.

Emerson Network Power has introduced Smart Solutions, a family of intelligent, integrated infrastructure systems for the data centre. As part of the family, the company also introduced the SmartRow and SmartMod offerings which, along with the previously released SmartAisle offering, exemplify the design principles and value of all Smart Solutions. These offerings are available globally. Timing and availability will differ from region to region.

Jefferson County officials have agreed to sell 4.5 acres to Community Health Systems for a US$25 million data centre in an industrial park on Lakeshore Parkway. The company plans to create up to 15 jobs at the centre in the Jefferson Metropolitan Park Lakeshore, or JeffMet Lakeshore as it is known. The Jefferson County Economic and Industrial Development Authority Board agreed to sell the property to Franklin, Tenn.-based CHS for US$360,000, or US$80,000 per acre.

Alpheus Communications, the largest competitive fibre network operator in Texas, announced today that it has acquired valuable new fibre rings in east Dallas County and Downtown Fort Worth from FiberLight.

The transaction constitutes Alpheus’ fifth major fibre acquisition in the last five years. In addition to fibre purchases, the company also builds rings and laterals in order to serve the high growth corridors in Texas and operates hardened data centres at the edges of a carrier-grade optical network.

Australian customer communications solution company Salmat is in the planning stages of shrinking 35 data centre sites across the country down to just two. Expected to take up to four years, the project will mean sites in states from Western Australia to Tasmania will be sold and data shifted to the Sydney suburb of St. Leonards and Ravenhall, Victoria.

Apple is likely employing specialized hardware at its newest data centre, a third-party announcement suggests. While refusing to name their client directly, two firms -- Instor and Electrorack -- say they have finished a project involving custom enclosures at a large data centre in North Carolina. Apple only recently established a facility in the vicinity of Maiden in Catawba County.

Cloud hosting provider GoGrid has announced it plans to expand to Europe with the opening of a new data centre in the summer of 2011. The announcement comes on the heels of the recent expansion of GoGrid's hybrid cloud capabilities at its two data centres.

The move reflects the company's global expansion strategy to accommodate growing demand for cloud computing outside of the US GoGrid's regional presence. The cloud hosting provider did not disclose any details about the location or specifications of the data centre.

Beijing PowerUnique Technologies has announced that its alliance system integrator has signed a virtualization contract with China Mobile Zhongshan Branch in Guangdong Province to launch its integrated data centre virtualization solution.

BPUT will assist the SI to provide the Customer with higher security and confidential virtualization solutions for its data centre, which will help it maintain its business continuity.

BroadGroup and TZ Infrastructure Protection, an operating business unit of Telezygology, have released a new white paper on 'Data Centre Micro-Protection' at the Data Centres Malaysia Regional Summit 2011.

The white paper reveals that the migration of IT into the Cloud is inhibited by increasingly outdated approaches to physical security within the server room. Virtualised environments and hosted computing services open up new business risks for customers and place new demands on data centre service providers and operators.

Vodafone Qatar has started building its fibre optic backbone network, capable of delivering super fast data speeds and ‘flawless call quality’ to business and home consumers alike. Vodafone is working in partnership with the government and ictQATAR to deliver superfast broadband to businesses and consumers in Qatar.

The computer network of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange has allegedly been infiltrated multiple times over the past year. According to the Wall Street Journal, which on Saturday cited people "familiar with the matter", the exchange's trading platform has not been affected. However, investigators are stumped as to the goal of the hackers.

In an interview since becoming Domino's Pizza IT director last September, Colin Rees revealed that Domino's Pizza is preparing for its first experience of IT outsourcing, as it focuses on continued innovation to meet the demands of its impressive online growth.

Nationwide Building Society’s web homepage went offline this morning after its servers apparently failed to cope with the volume of data. Customers attempting to access Nationwide.co.uk, in order to see their internet banking or other information, were greeted with the message “Server is too busy”.

The home page went offline around 11.10am, and returned over two hours later. A Nationwide spokesperson said: “We take any customer experience that falls below our acceptable standards very seriously and have undertaken a full investigation,” he said.

Dumfries and Galloway Council, working with IBM, has re-located its data centre to maximise energy efficiency and offer improved real-time data processing. The new location is a refurbished Category C listed historical landmark in Dumfries, Scotland.

"With its great extensibility and compatibility, BMC BladeLogic server automation will help us increase IT productivity as well as deliver high-quality automated services to our customers," said James Mystakidis, Macquarie's general manager of hosting operations.

UTC Power has announced that Cox Communications has installed four of its new generation 400 kilowatt stationary fuel cells at Cox facilities in San Diego and Rancho Santa Margarita, California.

UTC Power installed and will service the PureCell System Model 400 units at a Cox Communications administrative building, a master telecommunications centre and data centre. All are powered by a blend of biogas and natural gas.

Mobile network O2 has released figures today for carbon efficiency across its business. According to figures released by the company, in the last two years it has cut carbon emissions by nearly 30,000 tonnes CO2. Their figures are released in tandem with the news that they have been recertified with the Carbon Trust Standard. They were the first mobile network operator to be awarded the Carbon Trust Standard in 2009.

US Signal is again expanding its Midwest footprint with the addition of several locations in Indiana and Ohio. US Signal, which provides data-bandwith capacity in several Midwestern states, says the expansion is a big part of the company’s strategy to connect growing small and medium-size markets to larger cities.

TMX Group and Fidessa Canada Corporation have announced that Fidessa has selected TMX's colocation facility to operate its trading solutions. Fidessa, along with other colocated clients, receives the benefits of direct high-speed access to the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange and Montreal Exchange trading engines and market data feeds.

Amazon, the internet book seller, has bought the former Tesco storage facility at Greenhills Industrial Estate in Dublin 24 in the largest industrial property sale of the last 12 months. The 22,539 sq m facility had been on the market for over two years after the supermarket chain decided to move its warehousing operation to a state-of-the-art facility in Turvey in Donabate in north Co Dublin.

Power Distribution, a provider of mission critical power distribution equipment for data centres, has announced that its i-CON modular data centre solution has been deployed at Pelio & Associates' new 1101 Space Park data centre facility in Santa Clara, Calif.

The power-dense 24,000-sq ft building is an innovation in data centre colocation space, designed to accept preconfigured data centre modules, including the i-CON - addressing customer-driven need for highly redundant, energy-efficient, scalable and cost-effective infrastructure solutions.

Top administrators in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences presented to FAS and University IT officials the full transition schedule for the merger of the University’s two largest IT operations. The consolidation of IT systems is scheduled to be completed this June, University Chief Information Officer Anne H. Margulies said during the presentation.

TCS has signed a five-year contract with du, the integrated telecom provider in the United Arab Emirates, for providing IT managed services.

As its IT managed services partner, TCS will support du to enhance its customer services by achieving excellence in service delivery levels. The agreement will supplement du's efforts to achieve better customer satisfaction levels through improvements in service delivery, TCS said in a filing with the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Telefónica International Wholesale Services has selected Interoute as its core fibre optic network provider for Western Europe, responsible for deploying a next-generation optical DWDM network. As part of this strategic partnership TIWS will also become Interoute's provider for trans-Atlantic, USA and Latin America routes.

Interoute will provide TIWS with a 100 GB capacity network connecting the major cities of Europe, to support its future expansion plans. This long-term partnership agreement reinforces the business relationship the companies have been developing for years.

Global Crossing, a global IP and Ethernet solutions provider, has announced it has established a Point of Presence in Istanbul to provide multinational enterprises in the region with extended global network service. The PoP is colocated in Pantel's data centre.

Pantel, a wholly owned subsidiary of Turk Telekom, is a leading provider of international telecommunications services across Central Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, and the Caucasus region.

The city of South Bend, Indiana has come to an agreement to sell land in Ignition Park to a private company that plans to build a Tier III data centre.

Data Realty is a start up company that's based at Innovation Park at Notre Dame. The company says construction of the data centre should take 14 months. It will be built at the eastern end of Ignition Park, along Franklin Street between Garst and Stull. The site is 4.94 acres and will provide room for a future 40,000-sq ft addition that's planned.

QTS, a providers of data centre facilities and managed services, has announced that it has entered into a strategic relationship with leading broadband communications and entertainment company Cox Communications.

The relationship provides Cox Business customers with flexible, secure colocation space in the QTS Wichita Data Center, and offers QTS customers access to the Cox network and access to a new Internet Service Provider in the QTS data centre location. Terms of the multi-year agreement were not disclosed.

Is it possible that the ever-increasing demand for data centre space could be the cure for vacant commercial real estate plaguing cities? Whether or not they meet a purist definition of urban decay, vacant commercial buildings certainly are eyesores and economic drains on their surrounding areas. And the problem appears to be growing nationwide; Harvard Professor of Law and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Elizabeth Warren calls it a crisis.

Start-up data centre operator NextDC says plans for its first three data centres in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane are on track except for delay in getting power to its Brisbane centre because of Energex's flood damage restoration priorities.

The i/o factory's initial capacity allows for up to 18 MW of data centre modules per month. The first i/o ANYWHERE modules are slated to roll off the assembly line in the first half of 2011 to fulfil existing orders.

Mankind's capacity to store the colossal amount of information in the world has been measured by scientists. The study, published in the journal Science, calculates the amount of data stored in the world by 2007 as 295 exabytes. That is the equivalent of 1.2 billion average hard drives. The researchers calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 25 technologies from PCs and and DVDs to paper adverts and books.

TD Bank Group plans to open a new C$85-million technology and operations centre in south-Barrie on land it acquired almost two years ago. Construction would begin next month on the one-storey, 180,000 sq ft building and be completed by late 2012.

It will take the Social Security Administration at least until mid 2016 to build a new data centre to safely handle and store nearly 500,000 electronic records that determine benefits. Meanwhile, the agency's current data centre is in danger of "catastrophic failure," government officials told two congressional subcommittees.

Telstra has moved to further consolidate its servers and data centres in the wake of continuing transformation at the telco, “aggressively” ramping up virtualisation and lifecycle refresh programs in an effort to minimise impact on its operations and efficiencies. ough currently a “blip” on its quarterly electricity bill, Telstra’s data centres are expected to come under closer scrutiny once the company rationalises its assets under the National Broadband Network, according to the general manager of managed data centres, Jon Curry.

HP announced that its converged infrastructure solutions have been selected by G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottling, a PepsiCo franchise bottler, for deployment throughout G&J's 12 locations. The deployment is expected to improve the bottler’s business agility while lowering costs.

Vantage Data Centers, an innovative wholesale data-centre operator, has announced that it has completed construction of the first of three buildings located at its campus in Santa Clara, Calif. The company has leased wholesale operating data centre capacity to leading global Internet and semiconductor companies based in the Silicon Valley.

Hewlett-Packard wants to manage the construction phase of its clients' data centre projects, hoping to expand its revenue from this area and, it says, help customers complete projects more quickly and for as much as 30% lower cost.

Cloud and Managed Hosting expert, DediPower, provides a bespoke virtualised hosting platform for Morning Data, one of the UK's leading suppliers of insurance software to reinsurance companies and insurance brokers.

Economic development officials, saying the city must be more competitive in luring high-tech firms, have asked the common council to exempt large-scale data management equipment from personal property taxes. The request comes in the wake of recent news that Data Realty plans a new data centre in Ignition Park, the city’s proposed high-tech park on the former Studebaker property south of downtown. Pat McMahon, executive director of Project Future, the St.

IBM has announced workload-optimized systems to help companies manage a range of more demanding workloads that are placing new stresses on already over-taxed data centres.

The new systems include: A new offering for the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX), IBM's systems design that allows workloads on mainframe servers and other select systems to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system; and key new Storage and System x products, which can bring radical new levels of efficiency to the data centre.

Interxion, a European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, has announced an agreement with IP-Only, a Swedish Internet and telecom operator focusing on companies with high demands on bandwidth, accessibility and reliability.

The Dutch government plans to reduce the number of data centres it uses from 64 to four or five.

It will also scale back to one ICT work station manager for the core departments in The Hague, and the back offices of implementation and oversight organisations may be merged. The plans were outlined in the note 'Compacte Rijksdienst', presented by interior affairs minister Piet Hein Donner to parliament. The aim is a more efficient government and cost savings. It's unclear over what period the plans will be implemented.

Surge Trading Group has announced that it has selected Equinix for strategic and resilient colocation and business continuity services for its critical trading infrastructure. As part of Surge Trading’s commitment to provide the highest level of service possible, the firm will leverage Equinix’s network-neutral colocation and continuity trading services.

EZX, a provider of trading infrastructure for hedge funds and proprietary trading firms announces the availability of managed services from its new data centre located in Equinix's state of the art NY4 facility.

EZX has announced that its new data centre located in Equinix's NY4 facility is fully operational. “All of our existing clients have been migrated seamlessly, and we are actively turning on new clients every day,” said John Petschauer, EZX CEO.

CyrusOne, a data centre colocation provider, has earned an LEED@ Silver Certification established by the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and verified by the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) for the environmentally friendly design of its West Houston Data Centre, located along the North West Beltway between Interstate I-10 and Highway 290.

CyrusOne, a data centre colocation provider, has earned an LEED@ Silver Certification established by the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and verified by the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) for the environmentally friendly design of its West Houston Data Centre, located along the North West Beltway between Interstate I-10 and Highway 290.

ASHRAE continues to widen the temperature and humidity ranges for servers through a soon-to-be-published third edition of the datacom book, “Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments.”

The approach used by TC 9.9 for the first edition through to the present was to assemble a team of thermal engineers from the major commercial IT manufacturers to develop requirements. The first edition created a recommended temperature upper limit of 77 F (25 C), promoting the use of higher temperatures and endorsed by all of the IT manufacturers.

Irish managed services company Hibernia Evros has invested €1.6 million in a new cloud computing division that will create 50 jobs over the next three years. The new division, which has already signed a number of customers, provides computing on demand to allow companies of all sizes to outsource fully their entire IT infrastructure requirements.

Future Hosting, an Internet solutions provider serving SMBs and enterprises internationally and developer of Future Engineer, has announced sweeping hardware upgrades to all Virtual Private Servers hosted in its London data centre, without adding any additional costs to customers.

The role will be based at one of their large data centres in West London and will be responsible for managing the infrastructure within the data centre. The role will be working very closely with the technical manager to ensure optimum performance and longevity by implementing and supervising the planned preventative maintenance programme and through regular testing.

Genband, a developer of IP infrastructure and application solutions, has announced that Interoute, the owner/operator of a European voice and data network, has deployed the S3 Session Border Controller (SBC) to launch a secure SIP trunking solution for Microsoft Unified Communications that serves Interoute’s global enterprise and carrier customers.

Eaton-Williams, a member of CES Group, has signed a marketing and distribution agreement with Alessa Industries for Eaton-Williams’ data centre cooling systems to Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Under the agreement, Alessa Industries will supply a wide range of Eaton-Williams’ cooling products, including server cabinets, rear door heat exchangers, and heavy duty computer room floor grills, in addition to a number of close control air handling units.

FedEx this week unveiled the green features of its data center in Colorado Springs, which the company says will land a PUE of 1.28. Although Phase 1 of the facility was finished in 2008, the company recently added another 26,000 sq ft to the now - 166,000 sq ft data centre, and has applied for LEED certification.

With the Enterprise Data Center-West now open for business, FedEx will begin migrating its computing processes from Tennessee to Colorado Springs to consolidate its infrastructure.

Core Infrastructure Services (CIS) is responsible for the end to end delivery of distributed, storage, IP network and data centre services consumed by applications in the data centre environment. You will be member of the team that builds, implements, and maintains network environments across a global footprint of 25 data centres using leading edge technology to deliver the highest quality service and support at all times.

Adaptive Computing has announced a major upgrade to its data centre and private-cloud management solution. The new version addresses growing enterprise demand to quickly deploy infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or software-as-a-service (SaaS) from a centralized and intelligent data centre infrastructure.

The Provo, Utah company's Moab Adaptive Computing Suite 6.0 provides increased agility and automation to decrease the time to value for new cloud services, reduce IT cost and complexity and optimize overall cloud resource utilization.

Microsoft and T-Systems have signed a five-year deal which is expected to allow Shell employees to work together online globally. Shell will buy SharePoint services dynamically via the Internet to increase flexibility at work and to reduce costs.

Intellifiber Networks has announced it has won a multi-million dollar contract to provide managed network services to one of the largest data centres in North America. The Richmond, Virginia site, owned and operated by Quality Technology Services (QTS), is their newest and largest location, spanning 1.3 million sq ft including up to 550,000 sq ft of raised floor space and 150MW of power.

Unite Private Networks reported that it has inked a contract with Houston County Schools to develop an optical fibre communication network in Perry and Warner Robins, Georgia. The company has signed a 10-year contract for Wide Area Network (WAN) services with Houston County Schools. The 66-mile fibre-optic network will offer a substantial boost in the bandwidth capacity for the District.

Passengers of Virgin Blue Airlines were distraught as about 150 flights were significantly delayed in key cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, as a power outage caused its data centre to breakdown. Airport reservations system between about 8am and 9.30am on Sunday morning were inaccessible causing major delays in flights.

For years, the Interior Department's eight bureaus have planned and launched information technology projects on their own, often resulting in waste, duplication and lax oversight. No more. Where there once were 37 chief information officers and deputy CIOs scattered throughout the department's bureaus and offices, there now is one who oversees and approves all IT investments.

If you were operating a data centre as a colocation facility and all available space would be leased, would you prefer?

a) a single customer that bought all available space, b) a few large customers that bought all available space, or as many customers as possible, that each take up a little space but collectively booked all available space?

Or are you indifferent, since in all cases the building is fully booked? The math proves that there is only one right answer.

HP Enterprise Services has won US$281 million, seven-year contract extension with the state to continue providing health care IT services. The service agreement with the Oklahoma Health Care Authority adds new information technology services to help the state prepare for health care reform and make services more accessible to SoonerCare members.

2bm, an innovator in data centre power monitoring has launched a new White Paper to aid IT Managers wrestling with the problem of how to implement a server power monitoring solution with minimal or no disruption to daily operations.

BT, the global communications and IT services company, has announced a major broadband investment that will cement Northern Ireland's position at the forefront of the fibre broadband revolution in Europe by March 2012. The investment is part of BT Group's £2.5 billion fibre roll-out in the UK.

BT will supply data centre services to the St Antonius Hospital in the Netherlands, from its BT data centre in Nieuwegein. The UK carrier will also provide managed Local Areas Network services for the Sanquin Blood Supply Foundation and its 1,500 workers, spread across the headquarters in Amsterdam and across the country.

Centrelink chief information officer John Wadeson has a packed schedule of work coming this year. The welfare agency is in the middle of major works to make its data centres more environmentally friendly and its network infrastructure is being upgraded to meet standards for IPV6.

Acer, the No. 4 PC maker in the US, has released a line of servers and storage products for this market. The launch marks the company's return, or reinvestment, in the U.S. as a server vendor. Acer sells consumer PCs and related devices under its own name, as well under Gateway, eMachines, and Packard Bell brands. It had previously sold servers in the US, but it let that business diminish over the past few years. The company said it has made a major investment in this market.

Atlanta-based T5 has selected a US$75 million site for its data centre operations in the city of Alpharetta. Brandon Beach, president and CEO of the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce, congratulated the company. "This is great news, not only for North Fulton, but for the entire region," said Beach. "This data centre will support our current businesses and those that will be bringing new jobs to the area."

The data Center will consist of a 103,000 sq ft building, expected to open in November. When completed, T5's data centre will be among the five largest in the region.

Colliers International, a worldwide leader in commercial real estate services, has selected AT&T to help the company complete its multi-year transformation from a network of independent real estate firms into a unified global service company. AT&T is delivering a global telecommunications and network infrastructure solution through which Colliers provides a new level of content, services and applications to its partners and affiliates.

Interxion, a European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, has completed the second of three phased expansions to its ZUR1 data centre in Zurich-Glattbrugg, in response to consistent growth in customer demand. 640m2 of new data centre space was created in the expansion, which increases total data centre space to over 4000m2.

Interoute Communications, owner operator of Europe's largest next-generation network, has acquired KPN's 3,600 dark fibre network to provide organisations with network diversity into the main commercial hubs of Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, as well as six additional cities including, Dusseldorf, Cologne-Bonn, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Kehl.

By combining KPN's network with Europe's most advanced and densely connected voice and data network, Interoute is adding more resilience, diversity and density into the heart of its West European fibre network.

AIM-listed provider of cloud technology based telecommunications solutions Pinnacle Telecom Group has been awarded a contract to supply network connectivity for BBC to provide the outside broadcast coverage of the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29th, 2011.

Pinnacle Telecom will provide network and circuits opposite Buckingham Palace at Canada Gate, where the Royal Wedding media compound will be built, the Mall and Horse Guards Road, along Whitehall and Downing Street and opposite Westminster Abbey.

Science Applications International has announced it was awarded a contract extension by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for the Unified NASA Information Technology Services contract to continue providing a broad range of IT services in support of the NASA Information Technology Service Network.

Under the contract extension, SAIC will continue to provide IT services including managing worldwide network services; audio-visual services; telecommunications; IT procurement, security; and computing and mainframe system support.

QTS, a providers of data centre facilities and managed services, has announced that it was chosen by Eze Castle Integration, the leading provider of IT services, technology and consulting to investment management firms, for colocation services.

Eze Castle Integration teamed with QTS to expand its greater New York/New Jersey infrastructure footprint and provide clients with excellent proximity to exchanges and other financial networks, as well as strong carrier-neutral connectivity.

Reports suggest that Google will invest NT$1 billion (US$34.1 million) to acquire a 15-hectare site in a government-developed industrial park located in a coastal area of central Taiwan for establishing a regional cloud computing data centre. In response, Google's PR representatives in Taiwan declined to comment.

HCL Infosystems has received the prestigious LEED CI Platinum certificate for its Data Centre in Noida. The recognition distinguishes HCL Infosystems as the first company in India to be awarded the certification in internal construction of the Green data centre.

The LEED certification endorses the green data centre of HCL Infosystems, having demonstrated performance in site sustainability, water and energy efficiency, material and resource reuse, indoor environmental Quality, design Innovation and many other parameters.

Data centres in Christchurch appear to have survived yesterday's major earthquake, with customer data unaffected. Typically, centres were operating on generators as half the city's power supplies remain disrupted. Civil defence restrictions are also affecting the access of staff to city centre data centres, with operators having to work remotely offsite.

CBRE reports on the role of incentives in data centre site selection in a recent report. Incentives are critical in the location decision, writes study author John Lenio. But taxes and incentives often enter the picture late in the decision process. Prime site selection factors for data centres, such as environment and weather and overall power costs, still come first.

Global Crossing will make major upgrades to its North American network in 2011, including setting up two data centres and beefing up its core network with ultra-long-haul capability, company officials have said.

US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Information and Technology expects to move forward on a number of large IT acquisitions over the next two years while also seeking to improve collaboration, agile development, cybersecurity and innovation, officials said.

Emerson Network Power has released Recycling Ratios: The Next Step for Data Center Sustainability, a new position paper to help data centre staff address a key sustainability issue: reducing solid waste. In addition, an online calculator offers a resource for learning about the approach outlined in the position paper.

Acer, the world's No. 2 PC vendor, has helped the Ferrari Formula One team upgrade its data Center with the use of high-speed computing infrastructure and solutions, the company said.

Through its European unit Gateway, Acer has made available to Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro hundreds of multi-node GW2000ht servers that integrated High Performance Computing (HPC) technology with storage and connected systems, enabling the Formula On

A major utility provider in the United Kingdom, Severn Trent Water, has announced its intentions to rein in its energy use by cutting back in data centre space, according to the firm's chief information officer Myron Hrycyk.

You will be working as a Mechanical Commissioning Engineer on a data centre project in Saudi Arabia, the primary responsibilities for this role include excitation, protection and control systems to specific time scales, producing reports to provide a record of activity and carrying out remedial work on faults. This is a 9 month contract. Experience of Data Centres and overseas working is a must.

Global communications industry leaders have begun to accept delivery of the first part of the Europe India Gateway cable system. The leaders -- the 16 members of the consortium responsible for overseeing the building of the US$700 million high-capacity submarine cable system -- now can begin to activate their individual portions of the system and offer services that will enhance capacity and diversity from Europe to the Middle East, Africa and India.

Chip manufacturer Intel has announced it is to roll out a new technology for connecting computers and peripherals. The system, know as Thunderbolt, promises transfer speeds twice as fast as USB 3.0. However it won't reach its theoretical maximum because Intel has opted to use copper wires rather than fibre optic cables.

The company said it would gradually move to higher speeds over time. Apple will become the first manufacturer to use Thunderbolt, on its Macbook Pro computers.

Nottingham-based data centre design and build company 2bm has clinched £4m worth of new business in the last six weeks. New contracts were secured with three clients in the public and private sector. Details of the contracts are still under wraps due to commercial sensitivity, said 2bm. The deals concern the design and build of the clients’ new data centres.

2bm, set up eight years ago by Mark King and Jason Preston, has expanded its turnover from £4.5 million in 2008/09 to £7.2 million in 2009/10 and is set to achieve turnover exceeding £10 million in this financial year.

KPN's Getronics wants to lower energy use at its Data Centre in Haarlem by building a green cooling system. The system will be environmentally friendly and energy saving by using heat wheels. The wheels will use the ambient temperature to save energy by an estimated 40% per year.

The new cooling system will be in use in the first quarter of next year. The data centre is part of Getronics' green strategy for all its data centres. Getronics aims to improve energy efficiency by 30% by 2020, as compared to 2005.

A catastrophic and mysterious power outage hit Queensland's A$220 million Polaris data centre on Friday and sent a string of banks, businesses, and government agencies to their knees. Automatic teller machines, telephones, and internal banking systems went down and internet connections were lost after technicians allegedly bungled a diesel fuel test used to support the data centre's critical systems. It is understood fibre networking giant Pipe Networks lost connectivity to its entire server infrastructure racks, while the Department of Transport lost its disaster recovery functions.

As the recovery of Christchurch, New Zealand, continues in the wake of last week’s earthquake, telecommunication providers and data centre operators in the country have re-established operations and are now fund raising for victims.

A spokesman for the University of Arkansas, Steve Voorhies, said the data centre in the Administrative Services Building lost power about 5 p.m. Friday night. "The University of Arkansas successfully restored power Saturday afternoon and is working to restore network connectivity to the servers that host the university’s web pages and e-mail services following a major power failure," Voorhies said. The power failure was in an underground power cable conduit on campus.

The government of Japan is working with counterparts in US and the European Union to develop a cutting edge index to measure the energy efficiency of data centres. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan has teamed up with the US Department of Energy, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the European Union Code of Conduct to complete a set of standards calculating data centre performance per energy. Under DPPE, all factors affecting the energy efficiency of data centres will be considered.

Thieves broke into a Vodafone data centre in Basingstoke on Sunday night, stealing network equipment and bringing about an outage for many of the company’s customers across the UK. Customers have lost voice, text and internet access on their mobile phones, according to the company. Vodafone has not confirmed how many people are affected by the outage.

TELEHOUSE America, a provider of dedicated data centres, international Internet exchanges, and managed IT services, has announced that its public peering interconnection, New York International Internet Exchange, has completed its expansion into the company's new data centre facility located at 85 10th Avenue in New York.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that Colocube, a global enterprise and private cloud hosting solutions provider, has joined Platform Equinix in its International Business Exchange data centre in Atlanta (AT1).

The move enables Colocube to further penetrate the Atlanta market, as well as reach Equinix’s customer base in more than 35 strategic markets in 11 countries in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Imaginet International, a systems integrator and managed network, hosting and content security services provider in the Philippines, has been contracted by Geological Exploration & Drilling Supply to provide several IT solutions and services for their office in Taguig City. To achieve an efficient communication network, Imaginet will implement an Asterisk based IP PABX business telephone system into the GXD offices.

Dell Australia's chief Joe Kremer has such faith in a new breed of low-overhead data centres that he predicts a move away from the sophisticated, purpose-built facilities. The prediction is in line with the strategy at Dell, which has in recent years been diversifying away from its core business as hardware vendor towards becoming an outsourced services provider.